How an Open Marriage Works in the Age of Tinder

This week’s installment of our weekly interview series, Love, Actually, is with Adrienne (a pseudonym), 36, a New Yorker who’s in an open marriage and users Tinder to meet guys around the world.

I’ve been married for nine years, and with my husband for 14 years. We met in college. I went to law school and was studying abroad one summer in Barcelona. I was pissed that he wouldn’t come visit me. I wound up having a lot of flings there, with guys and girls-nothing serious though.After Spain, I took a break from law school and got a random advertising job. After a few months, I started feeling exhausted. I thought I had mono, but I was actually pregnant. I wasn’t sure if it was my boyfriend’s or from someone I’d met in Spain. My boyfriend left the decision up to me, but he was happy when I decided I didn’t want to keep it because he wasn’t in a place to think about having kids.I was so far along that the local Planned Parenthood wouldn’t perform the abortion. It was still legal, but it was past the point at which they were comfortable doing the procedure, so they referred me to a doctor. I’m calm in really stressful situations. I told myself, if this were dangerous, they wouldn’t allow it to happen. It was actually very quick.I got pregnant again a year and a half later. That time freaked him out a little more. He was older and our relationship was more serious; I was perfectly okay with it though, and with the decision not to keep it. But from that point forward, our sex life diminished quite significantly. We both fell into the mindset of, we’ve been a couple for a few years, we’d rather go out to eat than go home and have sex.I tried all sorts of birth control pills that didn’t help. I felt like they were making me a little crazy in terms of mood swings. To combat that, I first went on Zoloft, then Wellbutrin, but I was getting so fat it was making the situation worse. Instead of helping us to have a healthy sex life, the pills made me feel fat and crazy, so after a few years, I quit them all. When I went off everything, I got my personality back, but our sex life still didn’t pick back up.I’m in the legal industry, and I travel at least once a month for work. I’d be away in some fabulous city, have a sick hotel room, a good per diem, and I was by myself and lonely. In 2014, my sister showed me Tinder; she said she was meeting all these guys.